The Second Book of Lankhmar

looked toward Groniger. "Then you'd still be a cloudy-headed god's-man, you old atheist!"
           "That's as may be," the Isler retorted. "Afreyt said I was a troll-giant for a space, too. But here I am."
           "I doubt you'd find it, dove you never so deep," Fafhrd averred softly, his gaze on the leather stall covering his still bandaged stump. "I think Loki-cinder vanished out of Nehwon-world entire, and many another curious thing with it — the queller (after it had done its work) that had become his home (Gods love gold) and Odin-ghost and some of his appurtenances."
           Rill, beside him, touched the stall with her burnt hand which had been almost as long as his stump in healing. It had created a certain sympathy between them.
           "You'll wear a hook on it?" she asked.
           He nodded. "Or a socket for various tools, utensils, and instruments. There are possibilities."
           Old Ourph said, sipping his steaming gahveh, "It was strange how closely the two gods were linked, so that when one departed, the other went."
           "When Cif and I first found them, we thought they were one," Afreyt told him.
           "We saved their lives," Cif asserted. "We were very good hosts, on the whole, to both of them." She caught Rill's eye, who smiled.
           "When you save a suicide, you take upon yourself responsibilities," Afreyt said, her eyes drifting toward Fafhrd's stump. "If on his next attempt, he takes others with him, it's your doing."
           "You're gloomy tonight, Lady Afreyt," the Mouser suggested, "and reason too curiously. When you set out in that mood there's no end to the places you can go, eh, Fafhrd? We set out to be captains, and seem in process of becoming merchants. What next? Bankers? — or pirates?"
           "As much as you like of either," Cif told him meaningly, "as long as you remember the council holds Pshawri and your men here, hostage for you."
           "As mine will be for me, when I seek that timber," Fafhrd said. "The pines at Ool Plerns are very green and tall."

The Knight and Knave of Swords

         I: Sea Magic
         1
           On the world of Nehwon and the land of Simorgya, six days fast sailing south from Rime Isle, two handsome silvery personages conversed intimately yet tensely in a dimly and irregularly lit hall of pillars open overhead to the darkness. Very strange was that illumination —greenish and yellowish by turns, it seemed to come chiefly from grotesquely shaped rugs patching the Stygian floor and lapping the pillars' bases and also from slowly moving globes and sinuosities that floated about at head height and wove amongst the pillars, softly dimming and brightening like lethargic and plague-stricken giant fireflies.
           Mordroog said sharply, "Caught you that thrill, sister? — faint and far north away, yet unmistakably ours. "
           Ississi replied eagerly, "The same, brother, as we felt two days agone — our mystic gold dipped deep in the sea for a space, then out again."
           "The same indeed, sister, though this time with a certain ambiguity as to the out — whether that or otherwise gone," Mordroog assented.
           "Yet the now-confirmed clue is certain and bears only one interpretation: our chiefest treasures, that were our most main guards, raped away long ages agone — and now at long last we know the culprits, those villainous pirates of Rime Isle!" breathed Ississi.
           "Long, long ages agone, before ever Simorgya sank (and the fortunate island kingdom became the dark infernal realm) — and their vanishment the hastener or very agent of that sinking. But now we have the remedy — and who knows when our treasure's back what long-sunken things may rise in spouting wrath to consternate the world? Your attention, sister!" snapped Mordroog.
           The abysmal scene darkened, then brightened as he dipped his hand into the pouch at his waist and brought it out again holding something big as a girl's fist. The floating globes and sinuosities moved inward inquisitively, jogging and jostling each other. Their flaring glows rebounded through the murk from a lacy yet massy small gold globe showing between his thin clawed silver fingers — its twelve thick edges like those of a hexahedron embedded in the surface of a sphere and curving conformably to that structure. He proffered it to her. The golden light gave the